Privacy: New Report Shows Increase in the Number of Trackers Collecting Online User Data

The number of trackers collecting data on users’ activities on the most popular Web sites in the United States has significantly increased in the last five months, according to research from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkeley project, called the “Web Privacy Census,” aims to measure online privacy by conducting periodic web crawls and comparing the number of cookies and other types of tracking technology found over time on the most visited sites.

[Clip]

On those 100 sites, researchers found 6,485 standard cookies last month compared with 5,795 cookies in May. In both months, third party trackers, not the Web sites themselves, set a majority of those cookies, the report said.

In October and May, cookies placed by DoubleClick, Google’s ad technology service, appeared on the most sites on the top 100 list. ScorecardResearch, an analytics unit of comScore, was the second-most-prevalent tracker, the researchers reported.

See Also:Ghostery is a FREE add-on (we strongly suggest taking a look) that allows users to turn off all or selected trackers. Available for all popular web browsers. If nothing else, is fascinating to see and learn about the trackers on the pages you visit.

See Also: A month ago we pointed out that OverDrive had recently added anonymous tracking (via Google Analytics) to their iOS and Android apps. We shared some thoughts about it in this post.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.